A number of businesses and other organizations provide call centers in which a plurality of personnel answer calls, such as telephone calls or other inquiries, e.g. from customers or potential customers. Call centers serve a number of functions including facilitating the placement of orders for goods or services, providing information about products or the status of orders, receiving customer complaints or suggestions, dispensing product or technical information to assist customers in selecting or using products or services and the like.
Many such call centers are configured so that the telephone or other communications facilities manned by the call center personnel are coupled via a computer controlled system, e.g. for routing calls to available agents or other personnel. In the past, some such systems have included methods or devices for facilitating supervision and/or monitoring the performance of such agents. For example, some devices are configured to collect, store and/or analyze statistical data such as number of calls, average length of calls, length of time on hold and the like. Some devices include facilities for recording communications, such as telephone calls, of the agents or other personnel.
While previous systems of this type for facilitating supervision of call centers may have been adequate in many situations, it is believed that, for at least some call centers, there is a need for improved supervision support to provide for greater supervisor control of monitoring functions, facilitate the analysis or review of recorded conversations, record associated data in addition to audio conversation, and the like.
Specifically, some previous systems were configured to select random times (within time ranges) at which to commence next-call monitoring. It is believed that in some situations providing for randomness undesirably diminishes the amount of control supervisors have on scheduling of monitoring, particularly since call centers already have at least a first degree of randomness owing to the random nature of the times when calls arrive at a call center. It is believed this randomness is augmented when a second degree of randomness is generated by a computer, thus reducing the control over monitoring which can be exercised by supervisors.
Some previous systems do not allow for full flexibility in selecting monitoring parameters, such as by providing a system in which monitoring time intervals (such as date ranges) always apply to two or more agents.
Some systems are believed to undesirably limit the supervisors' monitoring flexibility by requiring that monitoring sessions have a predetermined duration limit so that once a duration of monitoring is exceeded, no further new calls will be monitored until the next scheduled monitoring. Some previous systems permit a supervisor to playback or otherwise review a recorded monitoring session but do not adequately facilitate the review or analysis of portions of the monitored session that might be deemed particularly significant.
Some previous devices provide for recording conversation by monitoring a line for voice detection and recording when there is at least a predetermined signal level on the line. Such a configuration, however, is useful only for recording, not playback, functions and thus a separate playback system is necessary when playback functionality over a telephone system is desired.
A number of previous devices were designed for use in call centers, and thus were not provided with features which may be desired or needed in other contexts such as field representatives, knowledge workers, executives, outside sales persons and the like.
Accordingly, it would be useful to provide a call center supervisory method and apparatus with enhanced monitoring scheduling flexibility, enhanced review or analysis capabilities and generally providing feature which facilitate supervisory functions, preferably in a system which is easy to use and economical to design, produce, maintain and use.